As we well know, these are the words that were set at the entrance of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The literal meaning is “work sets you free”; the real meaning, however, is much less clear, without doubt confusing, and makes for some interesting considerations.

Auschwitz was created rather late; from the very beginning, it was meant to be a concentration camp, not a labour camp. It became a labour camp only towards the end of 1943, and only in part, and in an ancillary capacity; and so I believe we can rule out that the slogan was, for those who coined it, meant to be taken literally and in its obvious proverbial-moral sense.

It is much more likely that the meaning was ironic, born of that caustic, arrogant, dark humour shared only by Germans, and for which only German has a name. Translated plainly it should, apparently, have sounded something like this:

“Work is humiliation and suffering, and meant not for us, the Herrenvolk – a people of noblemen and heroes – but for you, the enemies of the Third Reich. The freedom that awaits you is death.”

In truth, and notwithstanding limited manifestations of the contrary, the dismissal and vilification of the moral value of work was and is essential to the Fascist myth in every sense. There lies, beneath each and every form of militarism, colonialism, and corporatism, one social class’s desire to exploit the work of others, and, at the same time, to deprive them of any human value. This desire is obvious in the anti-blue-collar-worker attitude Italian Fascism assumed from the very beginning, asserting itself with increasing rigour as it evolved into its German version, and terminating with the numerous deportations to Germany of workers from occupied countries; but it finds its crowning glory, and also its reduction to the absurd, in the universe of the concentration camps.

The same can be said for the exaltation of violence, also fundamental to fascism: the manganello, which soon acquired a symbolic value, is the club used to prod pack and draft animals to make them work harder. The experimental character of the concentration camps is clear today, and it produces in us, in retrospect, an intense feeling of horror. Today we know that the German camps, both the labour and concentration camps, were not, as it were, a by-product of national emergency conditions (the Nazi revolution first, and the war afterwards); they were not a grim transitory necessity, but the first, precocious germs of the New Order. In the New Order, some human races, (Jews, Gypsies) would be exterminated; others, for example the Slavs in general and the Russians in particular, would be subjugated and made to undergo a carefully researched biological degradation that would transform individuals into beasts of burden, illiterate, lacking any sort of initiative, and incapable of rebellion or criticism.

Concentration camps were, therefore, fundamentally “experimental structures” an anticipation of the future plans for a Nazi Europe. In the light of these considerations, words like those set at the entrance of Auschwitz, “Work sets you free”, or like those at Buckenwald, “To each his own” acquire a precise and sinister meaning. They are, in turn, an anticipation of the new tables of the Law, dictated by the master to his slave, and binding only for the latter.

If fascism had prevailed, all of Europe would have been turned into a complex system of labour and concentration camps; and we would have read those words, cynically edifying words, at the entrance of every workshop and every building site.